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Fighting Fake News: How libraries can lead the way on media literacy | December 27, 2016

Fake news | Information literacy | Journalism

by Marcus Banks

Illustration: Rebecca Lomax/American Libraries

 

 

Librarians—whether public, school, academic, or special—all seek to ensure that patrons who ask for help get accurate information.


Given the care that librarians bring to this task, the recent explosion in unverified, unsourced, and sometimes completely untrue news has been discouraging, to say the least. According to the Pew Research Center, a majority of US adults are getting their news in real time from their social media feeds. These are often uncurated spaces in which falsehoods thrive, as revealed during the 2016 election. To take just one example, Pope Francis did not endorse Donald Trump, but thousands of people shared the “news” that he had done so.

Completely fake news is at the extreme end of a continuum. Less blatant falsehoods involve only sharing the data that puts a proposal in its best light, a practice of which most politicians and interest group spokespeople are guilty.

The news-savvy consumer is able to distinguish fact from opinion and to discern the hallmarks of evasive language and half-truths. But growing evidence suggests that these skills are becoming rarer. A November 2016 study by the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) showed that students have difficulty separating paid advertising from news reporting, and they are apt to overlook clear evidence of bias in the claims they encounter. These challenges persist from middle school to college.

According to SHEG Director Sam Wineburg, professor at Stanford Graduate School of Education, “nothing less than our capacity for online civic reasoning is at risk.”

Librarians and journalists: natural allies

Read more...

Yellow Journalism: The “Fake News” of the 19th Century

Fake news | Journalism | Alternate facts |Tabloids

Detail from The Fin de Siècle Newspaper Proprietor, an illustration featured in an 1894 issue of Puck magazine. Amid the flurry of eager paper-clutching public, one holds a publication brandished with the words “Fake News”. See full image below — Source.

 

 

It is perhaps not so surprising to hear that the problem of “fake news” — media outlets adopting sensationalism to the point of fantasy — is nothing new. Although, as Robert Darnton explained in the NYRB recently, the peddling of public lies for political gain (or simply financial profit) can be found in most periods of history dating back to antiquity, it is in the late 19th-century phenomenon of “Yellow Journalism” that it first seems to reach the widespread outcry and fever pitch of scandal familiar today. Why yellow? The reasons are not totally clear. Some sources point to the yellow ink the publications would sometimes use, though it more likely stems from the popular Yellow Kid cartoon that first ran in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, and later William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal, the two newspapers engaged in the circulation war at the heart of the furore.

Although these days his name is somewhat synonymous with journalism of the highest standards, through association with the Pulitzer Prize established by provisions in his will, Joseph Pulitzer had a very different reputation while alive. After purchasing The New York World in 1884 and rapidly increasing circulation through the publication of sensationalist stories he earned the dubious honour of being the pioneer of tabloid journalism. He soon had a competitor in the field when his rival William Randolph Hearst acquired the The New York Journal in 1885 (originally begun by Joseph’s brother Albert). The rivalry was fierce, each trying to out do each other with ever more sensational and salacious stories. At a meeting of prominent journalists in 1889 Florida Daily Citizen editor Lorettus Metcalf claimed that due to their competition “the evil grew until publishers all over the country began to think that perhaps at heart the public might really prefer vulgarity”.  Read more...

The Trump administration’s other war on the media | February 14, 2017

Opinion | Net Neutrality | Digital Divide | Journalism

By  Katrina vanden Heuvel

FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai in Washington in 2013. (Susan Walsh/Associated Press)

The Trump administration’s unrelenting attacks on the media and assault on reality have been well covered by journalists and media outlets that find themselves in the new administration’s crosshairs. Yet while the White House’s insistence on “alternative facts” may be more visibly ominous, there is another growing threat to the independent media that also demands our attention. 

Despite his crusade against the press, Trump’s contempt does not seem to apply to the massive conglomerates — such as Comcast and Verizon — with so much influence over what the American people watch on television and read on the Internet. And at a time when extreme commercialization has helped drive the decline of accountability journalism, Trump and his recently appointed Federal Communications Commission chairman, Ajit Pai, have signaled their intention to exacerbate the problem. Read more...